Toxic archipelago : a history of industrial disease in Japan

302 Pages·2010·6.82 MB·English

by  Brett L Walker

WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS
WILLIAM CRONON, EDITOR
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural
environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on
the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people
affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different
cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around
us. A complete listing of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.
TOXIC ARCHIPELAGO
A HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL DISEASE IN JAPAN

BRETT L. WALKER
FOREWORD BY WILLIAM CRONON
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
SEATTLE AND LONDON
The Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan is published with the assistance of a grant
from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company
Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
© 2010 by the University of Washington Press
Printed in the United States
Designed by Pamela Canell
15 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walker, Brett L., 1967-
Toxic archipelago: a history of industrial disease in Japan / Brett L. Walker.
p. cm. —(Wewyerhauser environmental books.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-295-98954-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Occupational diseases—Japan—History.
2. Human ecology—Japan—History.
3. Japan—Environmental conditions. I. Title
RC963.7.J3W45 2010 616.9'8030952 — dc22 2009037663
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-
consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
ISBN 978-0-295-80301-2 (electronic)
FOR CLOSE FRIENDS
How delightful it would be to converse intimately with someone of the same
mind, sharing with him the pleasures of uninhibited conversation on the amusing
and foolish things of this world, but such friends are hard to find. If you must
take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person
with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness)
CONTENTS
FOREWORD: THE PAIN OF A POISONED WORLD by William Cronon
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
Introduction: Knowing Nature
1 The Agency of Insects
2 The Agency of Chemicals
3 Copper Mining and Ecological Collapse
4 Engineering Pain in the Jinzū River Basin
5 Mercury's Offspring
6 Hell at the Hōjō Colliery
CONCLUSION
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
FOREWORD: THE PAIN OF A POISONED WORLD
BY WILLIAM CRONON
Among the historical phenomena leading to the rise of modern
environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most
striking was also one of the least visible: the proliferating presence of toxic
compounds in the webs of ecological relationships that sustain life on the planet.
What seemed like a new age of toxicity exploded into public view with the
atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945, followed in turn by countless nuclear tests and the radioactive fallout they
generated. As background levels of radiation rose during the 1950s and early
1960s, people around the globe became increasingly concerned that the foods on
which they and their children depended were laced with contaminants like
Strontium 90 and Cesium 137. In the early years of the Cold War, the “enemy
within” symbolized the peril posed by communist agents (and organized
criminals) capable of infiltrating and undermining national institutions, but the
metaphor gradually extended to include other forms of infiltration and
contamination as well. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 brought those fears
into sharp focus. Environmental toxicity was hardly limited to radiation: the
intentional use of poisons to control pests, she argued, was having devastating
effects as toxins accumulated in the bodies of fish, birds, mammals, and human
beings.
Although Carson's intervention might suggest to Americans that concern
about toxicity first arose mainly in the United States, in fact this transformation
in environmental thinking was world-wide. Japanese concerns about radiation
and nuclear weapons made that nation a leader in pointing the way toward a new
era. A year before Silent Spring was published, a mysterious wave of birth
defects in the United Kingdom and elsewhere was linked to the new drug
thalidomide, so that images of newborn babies with missing limbs joined the
victims of Hiroshima as sinister icons of the havoc that toxic exposures can
wreak. Whereas an earlier era had habitually looked to science and technology
for solutions to social and environmental problems, by the 1960s these agents of
“progress”—the scare quotes around that word are themselves symptomatic of
the new era—seemed as often as not to cause those problems. For a generation
growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the idea that one's own body
might harbor the poisonous seeds of future cancers and birth defects became a
potent source both of nightmares and political activism. In the history of human
fear, the post-Hiroshima age was haunted by new forms of hidden terror that
were all the more frightening for lurking so invisibly beneath the bright sunlit
surfaces of everyday life.
What was new, though, was less the poisons themselves than the public
awareness of their presence. To be sure, radioactive fallout was peculiarly a
product of the nuclear age and the widespread use of organic compounds as
pesticides were an innovation of modern chemistry. But before DDT was used to
control insects, it had precursors, like copper sulphate and lead arsenate, whose
biological effects and long-term accumulation in the environment were hardly
benign. Factories and mines had been generating toxic by-products world-wide
long before World War II, so to really understand the rise of environmental
toxicity one has to go much further back in time, to the dawn of the industrial
era.
This is what Brett Walker has done in Toxic Archipelago, his disturbing new
history of industrial disease in Japan. The book's argument is deceptively simple:
toxicity was an inevitable outcome of cultural innovations that viewed nature as
a resource waiting to be exploited toward useful human ends. The Enlightenment
rationality that enabled scientists and engineers to break natural substances and
productive processes into their component parts made possible efficiencies and
economies of scale that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations. The
benefits were obvious: dramatic increases in material outputs of all manner of
goods and services, from foods to textiles to machines. The costs were often not
so visible, concentrated as they were in the vicinity of individual factories or so
diffuse that they could not easily be detected by unaided human senses. Every
industrial product, Walker argues, also had by-products, unwanted materials that
were inherent to production but undesirable in and of themselves and so were
destined for release into environments that seemed capable of diluting or
absorbing them without much harm. Or so people thought.
In a series of horrifying case studies, Walker applies his analytical lens to
episodes involving different forms of pollution at different moments in the
Japanese past: organophosphate pesticide contaminations in agricultural districts;
toxic tailings and effluents at the Ashio copper smelter; methylmercury-
contaminated shellfish and other marine organisms off the coast of Minamata;
asthma-inducing chemicals from the Yokkaichi petroleum refinery; and the all-
too-descriptive “it hurts, it hurts disease” caused by toxic waste from the
Kamioka lead and zinc mines. Walker's tightly focused narratives of what
happened in these places—and his accounts of his own efforts to uncover the
toxic legacies of landscapes he has explored himself—enable him to put human
faces on events that might otherwise seem abstract and remote, so far from the
lived experience of non-Japanese readers that they might be tempted to regard
this book as having little relevance to their own lives.
Nothing could be further from the truth, since these vivid stories of
contaminated landscapes and grievously injured people and animals point
toward two striking moral lessons that could hardly be more relevant to would-
be readers of this book no matter where they live. The first is that modernity's
promise to liberate humanity from the constraints of nature was a lie, plain and
simple. In Walker's words, “transcendence, disengagement, or liberation…from
nature is a fantasy.” The ability of engineers to redesign productive processes so
as to maximize desired outputs almost always involved simplifying those
processes and turning a blind eye toward the biological contexts within which
they took place. To imagine that a reinvented human world could somehow be
created in isolation from the rest of nature almost always meant ignoring those
parts of nature not immediately relevant to the technological labor being
performed in any given place at any given time. From this willful refusal to
observe and understand the full range of outputs from a technological system
came the toxins that were invisible, mainly because people chose not to see them
until they were just too destructive to ignore.
This modern delusion of liberation from nature points toward a second moral
lesson, one that is even more disturbing in its implications. Our own bodies are
porous to the ecosystems we inhabit. The physiological processes that keep us
alive do so only by myriad exchanges—minute by minute, hour by hour, day by
day—of compounds, nutrients, minerals, and other substances without which we
could not survive. Our health depends on the permeability of our bodies to the
very nature from which we imagine we might isolate ourselves. So when we fill
the world around us with toxic substances, we fill our own bodies with those
substances as well. More often than not, the unintended by-product of the
resulting exposures is pain.
Here is the darkest insight of this dark book. Pain is nature's way of
communicating in the most intimate possible way—through the nerves and
fibers of our own flesh—the harm we do not just to nature but also to ourselves.
It is the proof that our conscious selves remain tethered to our physical bodies
and inextricably tied to the larger ecological universe even when we pretend
otherwise in our dreams. The implications of this haunting insight reach far
beyond the Japanese fields and factories of Brett Walker's Toxic Archipelago to
touch the communities, homes, and bodies of everyone who reads this book.